Four Loves, No Loves:

The Four Greek Loves in Ulysses

"Amor vincit omnia" writes Virgil in his Odyssey-esque Aeneid -- "Love conquers all." James Joyce remained conscious of his classical heritage during Ulysses' seven-year composition, drawing on sources from Homer to Dante to Thomas Aquinas to Shakespeare, and love was naturally one of his topics. Greek has words for four kinds of love: agape, or spiritual love; storge, or familial love; the love between friends, or philia; and sexual love, the familiar eros.

All four figure in Joyce's massive novel, gamboling about in his tapestry of words, yet all eventually evade the two male protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom: Ulysses proves ultimately to be a love-less work.

Agape -- spiritual love, the charitable love among coreligionists or between Man and God -- seems sure to appear, given Ulysses' protagonists' backgrounds and the host of Christian symbols that flock about them. Yet Stephen Dedalus is torn with doubt in his Catholicism, and we find in the course of the novel that Bloom renounced his Judaism, first to convert to Protestantism with his father and then, conveniently, to convert to Catholicism to marry Molly: both have fallen from their original faith. Within two paragraphs of Ulysses' opening we see a mock Mass -- "Introibo ad altare Dei" (p. 3) -- and hear the lurking Stephen scornfully called a "fearful jesuit" by mocking Mulligan. Stephen is certainly no recipient of agape here! Interestingly, Simon Dedalus identifies Mulligan as Stephen's "fidus Achates" (p. 73), a glancing Virgil image to set Stephen up as "pius Aeneas", "pious Aeneas", Virgil's hero of proper behavior to gods and men. But, as we see, home-stealing, ever-jeering Mulligan is no more "fidus" than whoring, drunken Stephen is "pius".

Stephen Dedalus is a prolix speaker, an engaging theorist and theologian, well versed in ecclesiastical history, particularly in the Church's early heresies. Yet, for all his knowledge and cogent arguments, he shows little inclination for belief. His arguments on Shakespeare's Hamlet are innovative, but he freely and "promptly" (p. 175) admits that he does not believe them -- what, then of equally intricate Catholic doctrine? Is it also only a tissue of lies, good for nothing but entertaining arguments? "You behold in me... a horrible example of free thought." (p. 17) Stephen sees only "the playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly... hangman god... [who] would be bawd and cuckold." (p. 175) Trapped in such cynicism, Stephen feels charitable impulses towards his destitute sister Dilly ("Save her," (p. 200)), but holds back to guard himself instead ("She will drown me with her," (ibid)): again he rejects agape. In the climactic "Circe" scene in the brothel, Stephen becomes a perverted Cardinal Dedalus, attended by the seven "cardinal" sins and wearing a rosary on corks and a corkscrew cross -- distorted faith and agape again.

Leopold Bloom seems more gifted with agape‚ than his younger companion, but even he seems never to fully realize his charitable impulses. Bloom's mind turns all his philanthropic impulses into practical commercialism. His help to the blind stripling crossing the street (p. 148) is filled with critical examinations ("Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose...." etc. (p. 148)) and followed by one of Bloom's pseudophilosophical musings, this time, of course, on blindness. Similarly, the sight of Dilly Dedalus outside Dillon's auctionrooms (p. 124) prompts some pity -- "Good Lord, that poor child's dress is in flitters." -- but no action aside from ruminations on Catholicism and contraception. Even Bloom's early-morning care of Stephen receives rationalization: it is all for "intellectual stimulation," the possibility of making money by writing an article, or opportunities to exploit Stephen's literary and musical talents on Molly's tours. Even Bloom's social agenda, as explained to Stephen over early morning coffee (p. 526), is to "see everyone... having a comfortable tidysized income...." -- with no hint of how to achieve it. Again, we see empty charity, thought without action -- lack of agape.

Familial love, or storge, receives similarly short shrift in Joyce's novel. Stephen describes his parents as "the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clapped and sundered, did the coupler's will" (p. 32) -- hardly a flattering picture. Stephen passes by his cousins' cottage during his walk on the beach, dismissing it and his parents' home as "houses of decay" (p. 33). And even among his first recollections of Paris, Stephen mentions that "Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife" (p. 35), a complicated perversion of normal family structure and relationships which mirrors Stephen's own unhappy thoughts. Throughout Ulysses, Stephen is tormented by the thought of his mother as "beastly dead," in part because he disobeyed her last wishes by not praying at her bedside. At last, amidst Circean revelry and hallucination, Stephen's father calls a foxhunt after his son, and his mother appears to torment him to the Luciferian exclamation "Non serviam!" -- "I shall not serve!" (p. 475)

Bloom, too, undergoes both memories of and hallucinatory reunions with his parents. Bloom's father committed suicide, a grim rejection of the family and of storge, and Bloom's son Rudy died in infancy -- his family has been cut off at both ends. Only wife Molly and daughter Milly remain, but they are both distant: Bloom has not had sex with his wife since Rudy died, and Milly lives away from home, only writing the occasional hurried letter. Bloom's parents reappear, however, to rescold him for a childhood accident (p. 358), and his grandfather Lipoti Virag "chutes rapidly down the chimneyflue" in the brothel to discourse scientifically and pedantically on sex, then to acquire a parrotbeak, turkey wattles, a "glowworm's nose," wings, and more: a horrid and unpredictable sequence. Even Bloom's locked drawers, home of his "Henry Flower" letters and legal documents, prompts unpleasant memories of his father's age and decline. Admittedly, Bloom's son Rudy appears, idealized and presented as he might have been had he lived (p. 497), and seems to link Bloom and Stephen in a father-son relation of sorts -- but Bloom's commercial mind drives out all possibility of storge‚ or charitable agape.

Philia, or the love between friends, is less common in Ulysses' Ireland than one would hope -- at least for Stephen and Bloom. Bloom is an outsider, and constantly made to feel it, from the newspaper office of "Aeolus" to the pub of "The Cyclops" -- in both places he is excluded, ignored or insulted. Even in "Oxen of the Sun," the narrator asks "with what fitness... has this alien... constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity?" (p. 334) when Bloom merely wonders over the medical students' immaturity. Even Bloom's attempts to give philia are met with a cold rebuff, such as Menton's stony coldness when Bloom points out the dinge in his hat (p. 95). And Bloom seems not to be the only one lacking friendly treatment -- Stephen is teased and ridiculed by housemates (Mulligan) and medical students (Lynch puts the boastful poet in his place, asking for "something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes" (p. 339), and the others attack Stephen's "perverted transcendentalism" (p. 341)).

Indeed, the world of Ulysses as well as its main characters seem bereft of philia. The intense political discussions in the newspaper office and bar show not so much a love of Ireland as a hatred of England: a love of violent battles and martyrs, hatred and killing. Bloom tries to explain: "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.... Love.... I mean the opposite of hatred." (p. 273) But he is mocked and derided by the others in the bar, even to the point of barely escaping from some violent ruffians led by the bigoted Citizen. The men of Ulysses have little agape, and Bloom sees women as scarcely better off: after masturbating on the beach, he muses on them "Picking holes in each other's appearance. You're looking splendid. Sister souls. Showing their teeth at one another. How many have you got left? Wouldn't lend each other a pinch of salt." (p. 302)

Bloom does eventually imagine a world where he is recognized and loved, in his grand hallucination of "the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future" (p. 395), ushering in the "Paradisiacal Era" (p. 397). But it is, after all, a fantasy, little different from his masturbation on the beach. The first act of "the world's greatest reformer" (p. 392), the self-contradictory "emperor-president and king-chairman" (p. 393), is, Caligula-like, to "nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix ["good screw"?] hereditary Grand Vizier," then to repudiate Molly and take to wife "Selene, the splendour of night" (p. 394). There follows the most frenetic string of promises and reforms, a literal attempt to be all things to all people regardless of contradiction, all too clearly summed up in his "free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state" (p. 399). So starved is Bloom for care and affection that he weaves into his falsehoods even a pregnancy for himself, bearing eight successful sons. But so accustomed is he to rejection that his dream comes around to that at last, and he is martyred, burned at the stake.

Last but far from least, Joyce weaves eros, or erotic love, into his tale. As with his dreams of Bloomusalem, Bloom's fantasies of eros are idealized and unfulfilled. He has not had sexual intercourse with his wife Molly for ten years, since the death of their infant son Rudy. He carries on an almost-erotic correspondence with Martha Clifford, but takes pains to keep her at a distance, unresolved and idealized. He masturbates to Gerty MacDowell on the beach when she lets him see her underwear, but that, too, is imperfect eros, not communal but casual, a still-distant, imaginary act more in the imagination than the physical, real world. Like the temperance service in the nearby church with its mere display of the communion, it is mere appearances, not the act itself. Fittingly enough, when Bloom's alter-ego Henry Flower takes shape in the "Circe" episode, he makes love to a severed female head: an unbodied, eros-less relationship.

Erosalso appears in Bloom's fantasies, but always as perversions or prettified past events. Josie Powell (now Mrs. Breen), one of Bloom's early romances, appears in his dreams in the slum street, and chuckles "You were always a favorite with the ladies" (p. 363). But when the Nymph of his bedroom picture interrogates Bloom about his sex life, he complains of his youth that "no girl would when I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play...." (p. 448). Which should we believe? The latter seems more likely. Mrs. Breen implies several romantic encounters with young Bloom, but on the verge of a more informative, definite part of the story ("you asked me if I ever heard or read or knew or came across...." (p. 367)), she fades from Bloom's dream with nothing but a tantalizing series of "yes"'s: the reader is left as unfulfilled as Bloom. In Bloom's imagined trial, his former scullery-maid Mary Driscoll comes to accuse him of "a certain [lewd] suggestion" (p. 376), but again it appears that nothing happened between them. As if to underscore Bloom's separation from eros, when the whore Zoe tries to fondle his testicles she grabs his potato talisman instead, and her request for a "swaggerroot" sends Bloom off onto an anti-smoking diatribe, hardly a fit conversation for a hopeful bed-partner.

Bloom's entire sexual identity seems warped, at least by the standards of Joyce's period. Several ladies of polite society materialize during his imagined trial to accuse him of sending them "improper letters" (p. 381) praising their underwear, offering to mail them erotica, and asking to be horsewhipped. When one of the dream-figures offers to fulfill the final request, Bloom "quails expectantly" (ibid) in eager anticipation -- not of a sexual encounter, but of a pseudo-erotic beating. Similarly, a Circean Bloom-dream metamorphoses the whorehouse madame into masculine Bello and Bloom into a submissive female to be beaten and ridden, and Bloom recalls lounging in bed wearing second-hand womens' undergarments, fantasizing over being ravished. When Bloom at last returns home, Molly complains to herself of her husband "never embracing me except... the wrong end of me... any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him" (p. 639), yet that is exactly what Bloom does -- kiss her buttocks, the most anonymous and androgynous part of her body.

In fact, Molly's final thoughts in Ulysses only underscore the lack of eros which has afflicted Bloom throughout the book. She begins to menstruate ("this bloody pest of a thing" (p. 642)) even as she considers trying to re-establish sexual relations, and moves in her thoughts to their tryst on Howth Hill -- the same rendezvous Bloom has recalled so fondly before. Yet, like all too many of the happy occasions in Ulysses, this one is in the past, dead and gone. Indeed, the book ends in Molly's "yes I said yes I will Yes." (p. 644), but the "Yes" is in the past, only another sad comment on Bloom's lack of love. Love is a thing of the past, dreams are sick counterfeits and cheats: agape, storge, philia, eros, the four loves, are forlorn.